flock, and is in its turn removed and the formation of a new lamb-flock begun.  During the six days’ novitiate of a baby-flock five other such flocks have been formed:  so that, somewhat remotely round about the main pen at the bed-ground of each flock, there are six baby-flocks, with their pens and herders and several little prison-pens for unnatural mothers, with other little pens in which mothers bereft by death of their proper children are confined with the extra twin lambs of prolific ewes, clad in the lost ones’ skins, in the sure hope that they will adopt them.  The ruse may be said never to fail.  The solitary-confinement pens are in the charge of still another herder, a much perplexed and irritated man, on whose part considerable swearing—­Mexican for small ills, English for serious occasions—­is to be excused.  A superintendent of two lambing ewe-flocks, it will thus be seen, has to oversee eighteen herders or so, with their charges, besides the growing lamb-flock, all more or less distant from each other.  He is a busy man.  His head-quarters, like those of General Pope, may be said to be in the saddle.  His note-book is in constant use.  It contains a record of each day’s births and deaths, of the twins (which are tagged or marked alike for easy identification) and the still-born, that each bereft mother may be provided with a foster-child, and the daily count of the daily-changing flocks.

The first lamb born starts the refrain, to be taken up as the season waxes by thousands of others scattered over the range, and swollen into a roaring, shrieking chorus, as though an enormous public school had just turned its urchins into the play-ground.  A listener standing in the hall of the Stock Exchange gets some faint idea of it when there has been a serious break in Lake Shore, say, or when C.C.C.&I. has “gone off” a considerable number of points.  Out of these thousands of voices, not to be differentiated by the human ear, the ewe knows the note of her little one with very remarkable certainty, and the lamb the answering cry of its dam.  With this sound ringing in his ears, and daily becoming more and more insufferable from monotony and increase, the sheep-man rides out in the morning among his Mexicans, and returns to camp at night aweary, with haply a couple of little ones abandoned by their mothers in his arms, to be brought up on that pis-aller of infancy,—­and, alas! occasionally of age,—­the bottle.

V.

When the prickly pear had made a golden garden of the prairie and the heart of Cereus phoeniceus was warm with the intention of lighting its gorgeous crimson torch on the divides; when the arroyo, but lately a pretty streamlet, had told wellnigh all its beads to the sun-god, and had but here and there in its parched length an isolated pool; when the flock at noon no longer flushed the last teal from the creek, because that lingering bird had finally winged its